A guy. A guy who writes stories. Stories about ponies. (And sometimes robots).
This story is a sequel to The Prisoner of Zebra
When Flash Sentry and Carrot Top visit Appleoosa, a routine survey mission takes a turn for the worse once Flash finds himself going up against a gang of ruthless, poison-slinging outlaws. But that sort of thing is all in a day's work for a Hero of Equestria, isn't it?
Volume 8 of the Flash Sentry Papers
Page generated in 0.116 seconds
Total duration
1,046 users online
226,280 hits today, 2,054,621 yesterday
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Sidewinders indeed
Woooot!
So glad to see more of these adventures.
You really should have.
10135866
Don't you mean "YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAW!!!"? I certainly do!
Another Flash Sentry paper. This is gonna be good!
Showdown at high noon.
Yep.
Nice idea with the Sideswinder to replace a gun! And Kid Cobra is obviously a reference to Billy the Kid.
Either Braeburn and the rest of the Appleoosans are stone cold. Celebrating Flash’s victory when one of their own’s body is still cooling in front of them. Or they know that the bite wasn’t lethal and the bartender is being overly dramatic with the cloth.
I'd love for there to be a crazy blacksmith/farrier in town whose passion is weather experiments and whose nickname is Doc.
Indeed. However, three rounds and 45 bits later, Flash was forced to concede that Golden was a better Parcheesi player than him.
10136589
eh. It was probably Silverstar's turn on "dead body in the saloon" duty rotation. You have have to maintain the proper "Wild, Lawless Frontier" ambiance for the tourists after all. Doubly so for such a celebrated, grizzled veteran like Sentry.
So excited to see another volume of The Papers.
Thanks, Tumbleweed.
And here I was, thinking the sidewinder was a firearm. Well-played.
And one that I'm still half-convinced was a wormwood-induced hallucination.
No comment.
To be fair, the kingdom's stance on most of the magic-mad fiends is "Throw Sparkle at it," so at least he's in good company.
I later learned the Bearer of Laughter had rather ruined the whole concept for the town. To be fair, the idea of her trying to seduce anypony is too terrifying to contemplate, so I fully understood.
Heartbreak in Ponyville? Oh no
Most likely.
Nobody's holding them back.
You know, I somehow doubt that's true.
He's more orange than yellow.
Not with your luck.
Quite a weapon.
Par for the coure.
She's somehow gonna get caught and Sentry's gonna be involved in saving her, isn't he?
She's very good at that.
Oh, brilliant.
Naturally.
Well, there's pies and then there's pies. And then there's Pies, who are one of the reasons why there needed to be a peace treaty in the first place.
Ah, the risks of an agent falling in love. Less than professional priorities start to make themselves known.
There's a story...
Excellent grim interlude. Looking forward to the showdown.
- Cut off escape routes from the Town.
- Raze the town to the ground.
- Loot and gain notoriety.
- Move to another target.
- Profit???
Did I get it right?
This was great and well worth the wait... However, please update soon!
A contemporary of Sentry had this to say about the infamous Appeloosan Assault Pastries:
The baker of the pie had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. "Make it intimidating," she'd been told. "Make it totally clear that this pie has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going Badly (with a capital 'B') for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over the pastry then so be it. This is not a pie for nibbling on for elevenses or slicing up for dessert with friends, it is a pie for going out and making people miserable with.
I'm looking forward to seeing where this is going - Sentry is (and Carrot Top) are awesome as usual.
Which is apparently still classified even in G.M.F.'s time.
Five minutes may seem quick, but in combat, it's a lifetime.
(Not that I've been in a fight outside of that time in fifth grade when someone insulted my mother. I'm basing this off of D&D combat time.)
Heh.
Less heh given the context. Carrot's not happy about this either. And as far as Flash can tell, she failed in her mission. Permanently so. The next chapter should be a very interesting case of dramatic irony.
The final "applied more anesthetic" nearly killed me. Nicely done. The writing, not the killing part.
5 min, an oncoming train, a shovel, 30 bodies and some rye whiskey.
That's the main action scene of a Jackie Chan movie.
Yeah, "the pony I love is going to die in agony and I can't do Jack about it" certainly's a reason to apply more anesthetic
Flash is going to be on that train, rescuing it.
I hope Carrot doesn't get herself killed.
Oh. I was wrong about who was saving the train.
Carrot and Flash are not having a good time today.
Hmmm. Imagine if the local whisky had blood-thinning tendencies and would have some antivenin properties. And Flash's bloodstream is usually half alcohol anyways...
Hey, any fight you can wake up from could've gone worse. I can only imagine what the Appleoosans made of the pegasus who wouldn't die.
Doubt it.
Huh? Isn't he dead?
Pragmatic.
That is unfortunate.
Oh cool, she's alive.
That's a terrible idea. From the moment the heart beats, the venom is already going into your system. At BEST, the other guy ends up with a mouth full of venom.
Right, that's what happened.
I can't stop laughing 😂!!! Alcohol as a blood thinner?! This idiot's bad habits saved his life!
I'm serious. This broke me.
10160321
Also, for the record, I had this plot point planned BEFORE you commented, so consider yourself a predictor, I guess?
Yay! It's not marked complete, so maybe there's more?
Boss Hiss forgot that a shovel to the back of the head beats a sidewinder every time.
10164969
.
Right?
This feels like the end of a story, hospital visit and all.
Not to mention the fade to black
Greater scope problem inbound?
10164796
I credit/blame it on the same background that let me recognize your Golden Harvest productions symbol on Five Friendly Venoms. Happy that I called it though!
10164969
Hopefully an epilogue with some commentary from either Twilight or Lovely Lancet.
Surely, by now, Carrot Top has to realize that if she needs to save civilians, she should prioritize them over Flash. His special talent is for survival, and someday, when the compilation of the Flash Sentry Papers has finished and military historians can cross-reference them with known records of his actions, someone's going to write a book (or at least a paper) analyzing how to inculcate some of Flash's improvisational abilities into the Guard.
From a d20 perspective, most Guards are probably warriors with a minority of the better ones being fighters. Most agents like Carrot Top seem to be a fighter/rogue multiclass. Flash is a spoony bard who has a pile of luck-based feats.
Soooo... his worst wound he talked about was the snake bite right? I thought it was something that left a scar of health problems later on the way he wrote about it.
Still, that pie throw wasn't really good... wonder what is the opinion of Appleloosa citizens on Flash now with him getting downed by Boss Hiss.
10165099
And there may or may not be a future installment where a young, but tousled Flash Sentry has shown up in the historian's home, puts up his hooves and asks for a Brandy while explaining there was a time-travel mishap. Golden Harvest was separated in the kerfuffle and he would very much like to know what he should do next, so he naturally sought out his older self, little realizing how much further in the future he ended up, so he was directed on the greatest living on authority on Flash Sentry... at least, that would be an interesting future chapter in the Flash Sentry Papers.
10165117
No, he'll be known for standing up to Boss Hiss, and for surviving a sidewinder missile! This can only inflate his reputation further.
PRetty sure half of Ponyville can pull of that trick.
And the ending certainly wasn't what I expected. On the one hand, fewer chances to get thrown into the meat grinder. On the other, greater responsibilities. We'll see how Flash handles it. In any case, thank you for another entry in one of my favorite series on the site.
Major Sentry huh.
Well, Clauswitz did consider a "clever and lazy soldier," to make the perfect officer and Flash is definitely both.
Edit: After a quick lookup the quote's origin is complicated and disputed.
One version attributed to Kurt Gebhard Adolf Philipp Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord is:
A promotion huh? I wonder how that will turn out for him. Probably Deadly with a side of danger.
What will happen next? Where will they travel? Who knows! (I vote for the Hypogriph kingdom via Kludge Town.)
Oh no. How will Flash survive this promotion?
Flash Sentry vs. his greatest foe yet: Responsibility.
Sounds about right.
Ohoho! Interesting.
Flash, don't be fully. You'll be sent somewhere horrible either way!
I wonder how Twiggles feels about reading this, all this time after the fact. Probably bittersweet and facehooving in equal measures.
A promotion will just mean more time trying to stay behind a desk and failing.
At this point I’m assuming that Discord is responsible for at least some of this success.
Discord is definitely involved.
10169580
That sounds like an excellent title for volume 9
10171498
So it would be a story about a restaurant or involve a lunch of some sort?
So how long until he becomes Supreme General of the Armed Forces?
Every one of these stories has been absolutely fantastic, thank you.
10171498
👈